It’s Fat Girl Fear Friday...finally. It has taken a minute to get my thoughts together on this even though it’s such a big part of my everyday thinking.
Epiplaphobia! Well, not exactly. Epiplaphobia is an extreme *often unwarranted fear of furniture. CHAIRS! Chairs are effing terrifying and it’s very very warranted.
First, there’s fitting in the chair. To see my brain working through the calculations and whenever I encounter a new chair would be a sight to behold. Will my ass fit? Will it spill over the sides? Will my body drip down around it? Will my leg touch the person in the chair next to me (fgf theater edition) this causing them to judge me for being fat (lots to unpack with this one)? Will it hurt when I get up/if I’m even able to get up out of it (see:kayak).
Second is the fear of breaking said chair. I immediately analyze the weight of the legs, the way they’re designed. If the chair is in the dirt, I wonder if it will sink deep into the soil. I check out the back of the chair and whether it can hold my weight and I consider if it will tip back, leaving me in a puddle of lady body on the floor.
I have three notable traumatic chair events in the my life (and hundreds of small experiences) that have lead to this...Like in seventh grade when the kid behind me liked to stretch out his legs so he pushed on the bottom of my desk and always commented on how I was too fat for him to slide my desk forward (I killed at math that year and got moved to the advance class...setting off a lifetime of me channeling my rage and sadness into perfection). The other two are classic breaking the chair at social event stories, one where I hurt myself and pretended I didn’t, in the company of people who I felt may just relish in this played out cartoon representation of a fat person.
Recently I reached out to other women and asked if they had chair experiences because of their weight and I was really overwhelmed by the feedback. So many of them had experienced this same fear and their trauma was tied less to the event than to the way in which those around them responded. To this day, I feel my legs muscles clenching whenever I’m sitting in a chiavari chair at a wedding, as if I could hold myself up should the tiny chair crumble beneath me. And at my favorite garden cafe, I’d say a little prayer that I wouldn’t be seated in the metal chairs that dig into my legs and cause a lot of pain when I try to get out of them.
My grandfather, who was an engineer, used to tell me about how chairs were designed with time limits for professional purposes, like fifteen minute chairs in airports to deter people from loitering or thirty minute chairs for doctors office waiting rooms to keep patients just comfortable enough. I always wondered if these numbers would be different for me, with a body that was probably even larger than the weight factored in to coming up with the average.
Chairs are everywhere. As I write this, Im staring at the white west elm chairs that I bought for my dining room with the curved seat designed for a standard ass. While the weight limit on them checked the box, I never considered how the curved seat would make them the most horrendous chairs in the world for a big booty girl like me. I resent them. Maybe I’ll use them for fire wood. Take that, chair.
All of this is to say that being accommodated in a fat body, anecdotally, seems to be the exception:chair edition. And with this lack of consideration comes a host of triggers that only contribute to internalized fat phobia. And fat phobia serves no one. Full stop.
Care to share? Tell me about your chair fears below and how you overcame them? Thanks for being here ❤️
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